and women from different origins create a society where diversity is accepted and is .... tsennosti') did not provide for an independent place for Russian Jews, who .... name was given to Königsberg, celebrated Soviet patriotism as the heir to an ...
Communist Cosmopolitanism Larry Ray & William Outhwaite (2016) ‘Communist Cosmopolitanism’ in European Cosmopolitanisms: Colonial Histories and Postcolonial Societies Edited by Gurminder K Bhambra and John Narayan, London: Routledge, pp 41-56
For much of the twentieth century around half the world’s population lived under ‘communist’ regimes. Despite attempts to impose uniformity across these systems they became socially, culturally and economically diverse especially as they entered more stable post-revolutionary phases, even if for most this stability proved to be short-lived. As well as actual regimes (what used to be called ‘actually existing socialism’) communism was also a political philosophy and world-wide socio-political movement. We offer some reflections on the possible meanings of cosmopolitanism in relation to communism although given the scale and geographical scope of communism this will necessarily be selective. At the same time, the diversity of these systems – the Soviet Union for example included 15 Soviet Socialist Republics and around 100 languages and nationalities – meant that there were inevitably encounters between cultures and different ways of life on both official and informal levels. The latter Hiebert (2002:212) calls ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ where ‘men and women from different origins create a society where diversity is accepted and is rendered ordinary’. Mobility, at least for some, created a kind of cosmopolitanism in which intellectuals and cadres from across the socialist world went to study in the Soviet Union. There were many other cultural exchanges, such as a shared literary canon of (approved) translated texts from across the socialist world, from North Korea to Poland. Maxim Gorky claimed that nowhere in Europe were so many books translated from foreign languages as in the Soviet Union and by the 1970s 70 per cent of titles published were translations (Gould 2012)1. At the same time, the question of the autonomy and recognition afforded to diverse cultures, and the extent to which the cosmopolitan idea had any meaning in these societies will be assessed here.
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Gould (2012:420) also points out that ‘Soviet ideology figured world literature as a communal apartment that could accommodate ethnic difference so long as all Soviet peoples agreed to live in proximity to each other; and be collectively enfolded into a common destiny’.
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In answering this question, a lot hangs on how we understand ‘cosmopolitan’ and cosmopolitanism’. Perhaps like Hannah Arendt’s table it is the ‘in between’ that unites and divides people at the same time. Cosmopolitanism is the ‘extension of the moral and political horizons of people, societies, organizations and institutions’ which ‘implies an attitude of openness as opposed to closure’, and ways of imagining the world that are bound up with the expansion of democracy (Delanty 2012:22). This is a shared cognitive order that permits different value interpretations especially the ‘triple contingency’ of personalities capable of intercultural and intercivilizational communication (Styrdom 2012:53). Cosmopolitanism can also (Pensky 2012:276) be a ‘futural’ term that projects a coming political arrangement. While communism was ‘futural’ (the promise of the higher stage to come) a system of varying but largely authoritarian political and cultural controls did not permit this kind of distanced and nuanced self, although we suggest below that such cosmopolitan forms might have emerged in the interstices of ‘dissident’ cultural practices. It is true that cosmopolitanism, in the sense of internationalism, was at the heart of the communist movement, with the much-used slogan from the Manifesto of ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite’. Following the precedent of the French Revolution, which had granted French citizenship to a number of foreigners, notably Thomas Paine who was also elected to the Convention, the Paris Commune of 1871 proclaimed all foreigners citizens, and that Paris was no longer the capital of France but part of a ‘Universal Republic’. Eugène Pottier, the author of the Internationale, condemned in another revolutionary song the ‘cell-form of nationality’. (Ross 2015) Marx and Engels did not systematically address the ‘national question’, believing that capitalism had pushed it into the background. As Enzo Traverso and Michael Löwy (1990: 136) noted, In a work such as The Communist Manifesto, cosmopolitanism and internationalism tend to fuse. There, the internationalization of the capitalist mode of production and the formation of the world market are seen as a process which has made cosmopolitan (kosmopolitisch) the production and consumption of all the countries... Where Kant would associate a cosmopolitan principle with ‘bourgeois republicanism’ Marx’s internationalism attempted to transfer cosmopolitan ideas to the revolutionary class 2
(Balibar 2012: 316). For Marxist internationalism the world market was effacing national differences and ‘national oppression is the outcome of social oppression’. This, however, meant that there was a continual tension between actual struggles for national independence that might not have a class dimension versus the claim that the proletariat is the only consistently revolutionary class – a tension that arose, among many other issues, in the Revisionist Controversy in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, the ‘question of nationalism’ was a permanent, unresolved theoretical difficulty of socialist movements. It is not easy to reconcile the principle that class divisions were fundamental to social analysis … with the historical fact that people always had been divided on a national basis’ (Kolakowski 1989, 2:88). Later Marxist accounts tended to divide between economistic (Kautsky and Stalin in their different ways) and the more culturally sensitive approaches of Trotsky and the Austro-Marxists, notably Otto Bauer. (Löwy 1976; Connor 1984) For those who regarded themselves as orthodox Marxists, such as Rosa Luxemburg, the ‘national question’ was inherently bourgeois and undermined a class viewpoint, thus she regarded the Bolsheviks’ commitment to self-determination as a mistake (Kolakowski 1989, 2:92). Lenin opposed Luxemburg and in principle at least favoured national self-determination (albeit ‘in exceptional circumstances’) and condemned ‘Great Russian chauvinism in the Party’. He spoke of ‘the inevitable merging of nations’ requiring prior passing through the ‘transition period’ of national liberation, just as the abolition of classes requires first the phase of the dictatorship of the proletariat (Acchcar 2013). Emergent communism diverged from the mainstream of social democracy in Europe in its opposition to World War I; The Zimmerwald Conference of 1915 brought together the Bolshevik and Menshevik wings of Russian social democracy and other anti-war fractions of European socialist and social democratic parties. (Nation 1989) The Bolsheviks themselves, like other radicals in the Russian Empire, ...were largely ethnic minorities. Ethnic Russians were a significant minority, but Jews, Latvians, Georgians, Armenians, Poles, and others comprised nearly two-thirds of the revolutionary elite. ...Bolshevism’s Russian-inflected class universalism was especially appealing in those social locations across the Russian Empire most affected by socioethnic or imperial exclusions. (Riga 2012: 4) 3
Lenin’s famous journey through Germany in a sealed train symbolised his rejection, not just of this war, but of the national principle. As Edward Crankshaw (1954) wrote: ‘His sustaining faith, his scientific base, as he would have called it, was that the world revolution, which alone could sustain the Russian revolution, was at hand. He was wrong.’2
Celebrating
“Two Years of Soviet Power”, Lenin (1919) wrote that ‘It will end in the victory of the World Soviet Republic’. This dream was already fading, but it remained a strand of Soviet foreign policy, where until 1943 the Comintern coexisted and competed with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and of the self-understanding of the Soviet Union and to a considerable extent of its people. Its internationalism was also central to communism elsewhere. There were though significant limits to multinationalism – at the 1903 Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, Lenin rejected the demand of the Jewish Labour Bund (Algemeyner Yiddisher Arbeter Bund in Rusland un Poyln) for recognition as the representative of Jewish workers. The Bund’s claim to ‘national’ status was based on language (Yiddish) rather than territory, and could therefore satisfy only one of Kautsky’s definitions that language and territory are the two defining claims to nationality. Klavdia Smoller (2015) notes that in the Soviet Union the public orientation towards ‘major imperial values’ (‘velikoderzhavnye, imperskie tsennosti’) did not provide for an independent place for Russian Jews, who did not correspond to the Soviet concept of nation. Paradoxically a gesture towards Jewish nationhood in the Soviet Union was made in the Birobidzhan autonomous oblast in 1934 although in later purges the Soviet authorities arrested and executed Jewish leaders (including remnants of the Bund) and Yiddish schools were shut down 3. Early congresses of the Comintern between 1922-26 spoke of founding a ‘world union of Socialist Soviet Republics’ although this global ambition ended with Stalin’s dominance and
2
It could be argued that, after the Bolshevik victory, continuing the war with Germany would have strengthened the prospects for a more radical revolution there, and there was some discussion of this at the time. (Castles 1982: 56) This more ‘cosmopolitan’ policy would however have meant a radical volte-face by the Bolsheviks and perhaps endangered the revolution in Russia. But as Craig Nation (1989: 217) points out of the Comintern, ‘With the prospects of Soviet power so uncertain, the creation of an international organization pledged to world revolution was an act of almost desperate defiance’. 3 In his nonconformist novel ‘Pokhorony Moishe Dorfera’ (‘The Funeral of Moishe Dorfer’, 1977), Iakov Tsigelman describes with great bitterness the suffocating atmosphere in the ‘Jewish Republic’ of Birobidzhan, the degeneration of Jewish culture under Soviet dictatorship, and the lie of the self-rule declarations (Smoler 2015:83).
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the policy of ‘socialism in one country’ which was entrenched by 1935 when defence of the Soviet Union overrode any other commitments (Aschcar 2013 ebook). Indeed, according to Maria Todorova (1994:107) in Russia the ‘hegemony of classical Marxist doctrine was a brief caesura in a national continuum of the eighteenth through to twentieth centuries’ and soon gave way to ‘communist nationalism’. Communism and nationalism were two rival modernization strategies that belonged (according to one’s metaphor) to first, heroic, ‘heavy’ modernity. By contrast cosmopolitanism, at least in the sense of ‘feeling sort-of-athome in lots of places or languages but not quite at home anywhere’ (Outhwaite 2015: 121) is located more within second, fluid or post- modernity involving a decentring of the subject’s point of view in a world of multiple cultures and identities. In this sense the Soviet Union and the rest of the state socialist world does not on the face it look like a promising place to find cosmopolitanism. Craig Nation (1989: 210) notes that, The international communist movement was never a simple expression of solidarity with the October revolution. It possessed its own conceptual identity and institutional infrastructure.’ Archie Brown (2009: 112-4), who lists internationalism as one of communism’s defining features, quotes the historians Eric Hobsbawm and Raphael Samuel on the sense of being part of an ‘international army’ (Hobsbawm) and ‘a cosmic process’ (Samuel). For Samuel (2006: 48), ‘Internationalism was not an option but a necessity of our political being...’ Inside the USSR, however, the leading role of the Party also meant the leading role of Russia, and in the communist bloc the leading role of the USSR, but with Russification, including of personnel after Lenin’s death in 1924 (Riga 2012: 9), coexisting with a more than cosmetic attempt to develop the role of other nationalities in the Union and later of its satellite states (Martin 2001). Engels (1896) had referred to Russia as ‘the detainer of an immense amount of stolen property, which would have to be disgorged on the day of reckoning’. In 1916 Lenin (2002: 162n) spelled out the point that Engels had been referring to ‘oppressed nations’ and recalled his critique of overseas colonies. Lenin’s policy on ‘the national question’ was on the more cosmopolitan end of the Bolshevik spectrum: he wrote to Kamenev in 1922 that he ‘declared war to the death on Great Russian chauvinism’ (Lenin 5
1960-70: 372). But this view did not prevail. Lenin’s draft of a key resolution in 1919 on Ukraine, criticising ‘attempts at Russification’, was watered down by the Politburo to a weaker formulation which was eventually, in 1963, inserted into Lenin’s collected works (Svoboda 1982: 88). The Soviet State was not envisaged as a ‘nation’ in the traditional sense but as a ‘new form of human community’. Nonetheless, it displayed key components of a traditional colonial power constellation – the presumption of the superior value of one’s own culture and compulsion of the Other to become civilised, cultured and modernised. These characterised the Soviet Union for much of its history and were evidenced in the way that during the Cold War it presented itself as an alternative route to modernization from the capitalist west. Further there were the campaigns in the Soviet Union against nomadism, religion (trials and executions of priests and desecration of synagogues in the 1920s), Stalin’s ‘purification’ of ‘reactionary’ Muslim elements from Turkish-language epics at the beginning of the 1950s and Russia asserting its role as the ‘elder brother’ to other nationalities, including those in the Eastern Europe. Most significantly, though, were the mass deportations of Latvians, Tartars, and Caucasians and the annihilation of subject peoples, including the ‘Holodomor’, the death by famine in the Ukraine in 1932-33 that killed over 3 million.4 On the crucial issue of the right to secede from the Union, also formed in 1922, the policy towards the non-Russian republics was a bit like allowing the provision of contraceptives to early teenagers: they should have the right to secede but it was hoped that they would not want to use it. Soon after the revolution, though, this ‘right’ became an empty flourish as the Red Army’s 1921 occupation of the Democratic Republic of Georgia indicated. In the longer term, the Union’s multinational character, which included the results of a policy of reshaping nomadic peoples into ‘nations’, was expected to develop into a harmonious unity.5 In the meantime, this policy was also intended to impress and attract peoples outside the Union.6 With the Bolshevik Revolution, the formation of the Comintern and 4
http://www.holodomorct.org/index.html There is a parallel here with the ‘dialectical’ idea that the ultimate ‘withering away’ (absterben) of the state envisaged by Engels under conditions of full communism had to be preceded by its further development. On the colonial theme, Viola (2014) argues (p.25) that ‘Moscow’s relations with its peasantry...exhibited commonalities with other empires...’. 6 The word soyuz also has the weaker sense of ‘alliance’, as does community or commonwealth (‘sodruzhestvo’) in the post-Soviet ‘Commonwealth of Independent States’. 5
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finally the personal rule of Stalin, communist cosmopolitanism was substantially reshaped or even denatured by the communist dictatorship, the foreign policy of the USSR and Russian domination within it. Cosmopolitanism survived however as a framework justifying the leading role of the new ‘homeland of socialism’ and of the Russian proletariat within it. In a speech in 1931 Stalin squared this circle: although Marx and Engels had been right to say that the proletariat had no fatherland, ‘now, since we’ve overthrown capitalism and power belongs to the working class, we have a fatherland and will defend its independence.’ (Brandenberger 2002: 28) Later in the 1930s, David Brandenberger (2002: 2) argues, ‘Stalin and his inner circle eventually settled upon a russocentric form of etatism as the most effective way to promote state-building and popular loyalty to the regime.’ Press campaigns, along with books like Gorky’s History of Plants and Factories and his History of the Civil War in the USSR, history textbooks incorporating the tsarist past and socialist realist art and films, ‘expanded the notion of “Soviet” from a party-oriented affinity based on class to a broader understanding that would henceforth encompass geographic and cultural semantics as well’. (Brandenberger 2002: 29) In 1940, for example, Kalinin, the notional head of state whose name was given to Königsberg, celebrated Soviet patriotism as the heir to an earlier Russian ‘national culture’ which had united Russians and the ‘most conscious elements of the oppressed nationalities’. (Brandenberger 2002: 62) This theme was reinforced in the war years. As Tillett (1969: 61) writes, ‘Whatever the fine points of distinction may have been between the new Soviet patriotism and old Russian nationalism, they were soon lost sight of in the great emergency.’ A Pravda article of 1941 celebrating the Bolsheviks as the ‘continuators of the best patriotic traditions of the Russian people’ had sub-headings characterising the Russians as ‘Great Builders, Versatile Artists, Bold Reformers, an Industrious People and Bold Inventors, Persistent Researchers and Fearless Pathfinders’. (Tillett 1969: 61-2) One writer was so irritated by Stalin’s harping on the greatness of Russia that she said she would henceforth call herself a Tatar. This theme continued after the war and after Stalin’s death in 1953, with the call for ‘study of the fundamental stages and dynamics of the history of the peoples of the USSR, the history of the USSR’s proletariat and peasantry, the progressive role of Russia in the history of humanity, science, and culture, the development of the international revolutionary 7
movement, and the leading role of the Russian people in the USSR’s brotherly family of nations’ (quoted by Brandenberger (2002: 242)). This theme was combined in the 1950s, and right through to the dissolution of the USSR, with the notion of a Soviet ‘people’ (narod).7 As summarized by Chinn and Kaiser (1996: 75): During the 1960s and 1970s, the creation of one united Soviet people became the focal point of research on the national question. According to the national dialectic, nations had blossomed (rastsvet) as a result of the twin policies of korenizatsiya [indigenization] and federalization. By the 1980s, the nationalization that was the product of this rastsvet was said to be essentially complete. Nations were also said to be drawing together (sblizheniye) into one Soviet people, even when they retained their sense of national identity. As late as the autumn of 1989, Gorbachev was still stressing this theme: We have grown up in a social atmosphere literally permeated with internationalism. Friendship of the peoples was not some kind of abstract slogan for us, but an everyday reality. Can we really forget that? Can we renounce the internationalist legacy of the revolution? (Chinn and Kaiser 1996: 75-6)8 He pursued this theme in his address to the Council of Europe (Strasbourg, 6 July 1989) where he called for ‘a common European home’ based on mutual respect for difference but united in a higher purpose (Gorbachev 1989: 6), a theme he developed subsequently in calls for global government, which soon became overtaken by events. In this speech, while stressing Europe’s ‘accomplishments’ and ‘world historic role’, he also reminded his audience …that the metastases of colonial slavery spread around the world from Europe. It was here that fascism came into being. It was here that the most destructive wars started. (Gorbachev 1989: 4),
7
See however the qualification by Martin (2001: 451) that this was not understood as a nationality but as ‘our multinational sovietskii narod’. 8 The collection of letters to the weekly magazine Ogonyok in the late 1980s reprinted by Cerf and Albee (1990) includes a substantial section on the nationalities issue.
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Soviet nationality policy remains a contentious topic and, apart from anything else, it was structurally complex, with a hierarchy of national territories comprising Union Republics, Autonomous Republics, Autonomous Regions and National Districts. (Connor 1984: 218221) The Union Republic constitutions of 1937, based on the 1936 constitution of the USSR, recalled (Article 2) that they were based on the ‘destruction of nationalist counterrevolution’ and the USSR constitution proclaimed the ‘equality of rights of all citizens of the USSR, regardless of their nationality or race’ and proscribed any discriminatory practices or the ‘preaching of racial or national exclusiveness’ (Svoboda 1982: 91). This coincided however with massive deportations for “security reasons”, first of Chinese and Koreans to Central Asia, then, after 1939, from the Baltic States and other previously foreign territories. After the German attack in 1941, Soviet Germans were also moved from the Volga region to Central Asia, and their autonomous region was abolished. Later in the war, Soviet Muslims and Greeks were moved away from border areas. ‘Six of the deported nationalities – the Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Chechens with Ingushi, Balkars, and Kalmyks, constituted, or belonged to, autonomous republics...[whose territories were]...altered or abolished without their consent.’ (Svoboda 1982: 92-4) As Alexander Nekrich (1978: 187), argued, fears or accusations of collaboration reflected a ‘traditionally suspicious attitude toward non-Russians’ In an appendix to his book, he records a conversation in 1975 on a train with a woman who says: To me all nationalities are the same – Chechens, Jews [giving me a meaningful look at this point], Ingush. But during the war there were so many bandits among ‘them’. The deportations were also justified after the event with claims that, for example, ‘The Tatar population was never industrious’. (Nekrich 1978: 167) This coexisted however with an official line since World War 2 on relations between Russians and non-Russians ‘that not only does no hostility now exist, but that it has never existed...The obvious purpose of this
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new version of the history of the non-Russian peoples and their relations with Russians is to support Soviet efforts to solve lingering nationality problems.’ (Tillett 1969: 6)9 Linking these internal policies with the international role of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Katerina Clark (2011: 5) has described the imperial image of Moscow as a ‘fourth Rome’, a beacon in the Union and the world. Arguably, in the 1930s the causes of nationalism, internationalism, and even cosmopolitanism were not distinct but to a significant degree imbricated with one another in a mix peculiar to that decade. In the case of Soviet cosmopolitanism in this decade, it was of a distinctive kind, inextricably bound up with Soviet internationalism and patriotism, yet not reducible to either. An important aspect of this international policy was what Michael David-Fox (2012) calls ‘cultural diplomacy’ and, relatedly, the arrangements for the reception of foreign visitors. The same organisation, the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS), was responsible for both from 1925 until its dissolution in 1957. Its staff and associates, the latter including figures as eminent as Gorky, are described by David-Fox (2012: 6-7) as ‘Stalinist Westernizers’, embodying the characteristically Soviet oscillation between a sense of inferiority to the West and, especially in the later stages, the ‘Stalinist superiority complex’. (David-Fox 2012: chapter 8) As Ilya Ehrenburg put it, ‘Unending talk about one’s superiority is linked with grovelling before all things foreign – they are but different aspects of an inferiority complex’ (quoted by David-Fox, 2012: 286). The Stalinist westernizers and the less cosmopolitan officials who followed them in the late 1930s interacted with more or less sympathetic intellectuals abroad, applying an often unreliable political litmus test to distinguish ‘friends of the Soviet Union’ from those more hostile to it. (David-Fox 2012: chapter 6) David-Fox (2002: 227) provides an interesting angle on Western sympathizers and ‘fellowtravellers’ – a term (poputchiki) which he points out was used by Trotsky to describe nonparty, non-proletarian littérateurs who collaborated with the Soviet regime. The most
9
Alexander Motyl (1990: 88) makes the point: ‘As an inevitable consequence of the contradiction between a centralized Communist Party and an Austro-Marxist state, national Communism has been a recurrent and irrepressible feature of Soviet history.’
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celebrated visitors tended also to be literary intellectuals.10 If, as was often the case, they were known to be, or turned out to be, sympathetic to the regime, so much the better. For all the vast differences between the political and cultural contexts in which they operated, Western intellectual friends of communism and Soviet mediators had a number of traits in common. Sometimes, the Soviet Westernizers were motivated in their political service by considerations similar to those prompting Western intellectuals to assume the status of friends – most notably anti-fascism. More frequently, a powerful cultural romance pulled them either to Soviet Russia or to the West. As intellectuals in politics, both groups eagerly mobilized themselves to crisscross the divide between culture and power. Above all, they had one another to admire. Surely it made a difference to the fellow-travellers that their Soviet “handlers” were among the most brilliant and accomplished figures in Soviet culture. Gorky played an exceptionally important role here, as an exile from Imperial Russia and de facto also from the USSR for most of the 1920s, describing himself ironically around the time of a visit in 1929 as a ‘foreign notable’ (znatnyi inostranets). (David-Fox 2002: 142) Returning definitively on Stalin’s invitation in 1932, he combined his cosmopolitan activity and reputation with public loyalty to the regime: ‘...European and cosmopolitan, the internationally famous face of the regime facing West...and...the sharp-tongued purveyor of ressentiment and Soviet/Russian superiority over bourgeois European barbarism.’ (DavidFox 2002: 146) The anticosmopolitan campaign initiated in the middle of the War (1943) was revived in 1947, including a speech by Molotov, then foreign minister, who declared that the Soviet people are resolute in their determination to bring an end to the remnants of the past as soon as possible and to launch unrelenting attacks on all
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As Katarina Clark (2011: 10) notes, in the 1930s ‘culture began to take off both as a value for its own sake and as emblem of national glory...’ Some ‘fellow travellers’ wagered the lack of freedom in the Soviet Union against international solidarity. In 1950 Sartre (who subsequently became disillusioned) responded to Raymond Aron’s defence of western toleration that the orphans of Vietnam and Kenya were not interested in the liberal climate of Paris or London (Caute 1988: 335-6). 1956 (the ‘secret’ speech and invasion of Hungary) jolted many fellow travellers, and Communist Party members into a more critical stance.
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manifestations of groveling before and slavish imitation of the West and its capitalist culture. ( Azadovskii and Egorov 2002: 66) By 1949 the campaign was explicitly antisemitic, with the satirical magazine Krokodil publishing in March a cartoon of the rootless cosmopolitan intellectual on the road11 As the story illustrated by this cartoon demonstrates, the anti-cosmopolitan motif has long survived the communist epoch in Russia and is now often oriented around the critique of ‘Russophobia’ (Feklyunina 2012). On the specifically antisemitic dimension of the campaign, Stalin’s daughter wrote of his “well-known tendency to see 'Zionism' and plots everywhere." After his death and the exposure of the ‘Doctors’ Plot’, antisemitic letters were still being sent to Khrushchev. (Brandenberger 2002: 240-1) The anti-cosmopolitan campaign was not discussed in print in the USSR until 1989, when a number of critical commentaries were published. Cosmopolitanism remained a pejorative term throughout this period. The entry in a Soviet encyclopedia characterises it briskly as a ‘reac.(tionary) bourg(eois) ideology’ (Vvedenskii 1949: 263-4). In East Germany, the Kleines Wörterbuch der marxistisch-leninistischen Philosophie (Dietz 1979) defines it thus: Term for views and theories...that the nation is anachronistic and must be replaced by transnational unions. Whereas cosmopolitanism played a relatively progressive role in the period in which the bourgeois nations were being developed...it has now become a reactionary ideology which serves as a means for imperialism to oppress other nations under the rubric of integration.... ‘Internationalism’, by contrast, usually specified as ‘proletarian’ or ‘socialist’ internationalism, was a positive term in Soviet discourse. (Rupprecht 2015: 9-10) It was described in 1976 by Mikhail Suslov, the guardian of Soviet ideology, as the ‘holy of holies’ and ‘the most valuable achievement and inexhaustible source’ of world communism. (Valdez 1993: 74) The context of Suslov’s speech was however a substantial disagreement at the CPSU Party Congress two weeks earlier, in which the Italian Eurocommunist Enrico Berlinguer had repudiated the term, speaking only of ‘internationalism’ and for ‘full 11
See http://www.interpretermag.com/moscow-needs-a-new-anti-cosmopolitan-campaign-russian-historiansays/ and http://www.interpretermag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Cosmopolitan.jpg)
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independence of every country’. (Valdez 1993: 74-5) For the Western communist reformers, prominent in Italy and Spain though less so in France and Portugal, ‘proletarian internationalism’ had been irredeemably discredited by its use to justify the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Interestingly, Suslov, along with the later General Secretary Yuri Andropov, had opposed the invasion precisely because of its likely impact on the world communist movement. (Valdez 1993: 164) Eurocommunism was, among other things, an attempt by Western European communists, with some support within the bloc from Yugoslavia and Romania, to resist the long-standing Soviet tendency to subordinate them to Soviet policy as if they were in one of the satellites. Historians have probably not yet fully got the measure of the astonishing transformation in the fate of the USSR in the late 1940s, from having been invaded and almost overrun by Nazi Germany to finding itself with a massive ally in communist China and a smaller but even more important quasi-empire in Eastern and Central Europe. This colossal surprise, which might have been expected to make the regime more secure and less paranoid, is matched only by the Bolsheviks’ earlier surprise at finding themselves in control of Russia after the Revolution. The Soviet relationship with the Chinese communists had always been rocky, but as late as 1957 Mao was acknowledging the leading role of the USSR with the compliment that ‘China has not even one-fourth of a Sputnik while the Soviet Union has two’. (Sharp 1991: 231) In Europe, despite the protest movements in Germany in 1953 and Poland and, most seriously, Hungary, in 1956, communist rule seemed secure. The Cuban Revolution in 1959, though initially without much Soviet input, was a further gain12. The USSR’s foreign policy was however also influenced to a limited extent by ideological themes of internationalism and cosmopolitanism, especially when they converged with its interests as a world power surrounded, as they saw it, by a largely hostile world. Even more than the VOKS workers discussed above, Soviet foreign affairs specialists, the ‘internationalists’ (mezhdunarodniki), were well informed and privileged. (Eran 1979; Rupprecht 2015) The socialist countries were the only really substantial support for anticolonial liberation movements, with the US suspicious of the continuation of European
12
For an interesting analysis of Stalin’s perception and misperception of internal and external threats, based on the Stalin archives, see Davies and Harris 2014, esp. ch. 3, pp. 92-130 (‘Capitalist Encirclement’). They avoid the term paranoia (p. 275). See also Snyder and Brandon 2014.
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colonialism but pursuing its own imperial role in its ‘near abroad’ and, from the late 1940s, an anticommunist crusade which often involved propping up western stooges in the Third World. As Craig Nation notes, ...Lenin never abandoned the conviction, an inheritance of classical Marxism, that the industrial proletariat of Europe and North America held the key to the socialist future. All the same, by arguing the existence of an organic link between proletarian class struggle and anti-imperialist national movements, he provided international communism with a “third-worldist” orientation that has been the source of some of its greatest triumphs. Within the anti-colonial movements themselves, notably the ANC in South Africa, communists, along with other socialists, played a major role. The South African regime provided an ironical recognition of this in its Suppression of Communism Act of 1950, which included most oppositional activity under the label. Other anti-colonial activists, such as George Padmore, moved in the 1930s from communism to socialist Pan-Africanism, in Padmore’s case because of Soviet collusion with the British. By the mid-twentieth century, the Indian sub-continent and Latin America had largely emerged from colonial rule, but Latin America was of particular importance from the early 1960s to the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries, as a relatively advanced region where there were substantial socialist and populist movements. Tobias Rupprecht (2015: 126), in his comprehensive analysis of these interactions, argues that ‘...Soviet internationalism after Stalin [was]...a functioning principle within Soviet society...a combination of socialist internationalism of the 1920s and cultural internationalism of the 1950s and 1960s’.13 For some reform-minded Soviet intellectuals and functionaries, Latin American communists were an impressive contrast to the grey figures who ruled at home. (Rupprecht 2015: 280-81)14 The communist bloc also engaged in a number of more informal political and cultural activities on a world scale, such as the World Festivals of Youth and Students, held first in Czechoslovakia, in 1947, and for the rest of the century mostly in
13
He notes the irony that the magazine Kultura i Zhizn, ‘with an inglorious past in the forefront of the anticosmopolitan campaigns in the late 1940s, was available from 1957 as Cultura y Vida...(Rupprecht 2015: 35). 14 One of us recalls visiting an East German academic in the 1980s whose office was decorated with exotic posters from Cuba.
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communist states, notably in the USSR in 1957. In such events, like those organised by the very well-funded Soviet Peace Committee (probably linked to the KGB), state propaganda aims are hard to disentangle from a genuine enthusiasm on the part of those involved for cultivating international friendship. Campaigns against the war in Vietnam and on behalf of Nelson Mandela or the US academic and communist activist Angela Davis were perceived by many participants as genuinely cosmopolitan interventions, however much they may have also have served propaganda and foreign policy goals. (Mark et al 2015) Internally, too, the USSR can in many ways be described, as it has been by David Martin, as an ‘affirmative action empire’ – at least, as he suggests, for the period up to 1938. ‘Russia’s new revolutionary government was the first of the old European multiethnic states to confront the rising tide of nationalism and respond by systematically promoting the national consciousness of its ethnic minorities and establishing for them many of the characteristic institutional forms of the nation-state.’ (Martin 2001: 1)15 Even after 1938, and the new valorisation of Russian leadership and Friendship of the Peoples, ‘Affirmative Action and nation-building would continue...’ (Martin 2001: 461). If as Papastergiadis (2012:220) says ‘cosmopolitanism is the product of an idea of the world and an ideal form of global citizenship’ then the Soviet ideal of a community of socialist nations that transcended existing national boundaries appeared to reflect this ideal. However, the Soviet citizen had definitely to belong somewhere – every internal passport stated the holder’s nationality – and the cosmopolitan aesthetic of ‘belonging nowhere’ was anathema to Soviet authorities. This cosmopolitan threat was indeed epitomized by the Jewish intellectual or ‘rootless cosmopolitan’. The image of the Jew is thus the embodiment of negative cosmopolitanism – stateless and rootless. By end of the nineteenth century cosmopolitanism had transferred from an avant-garde ideal to a vital threat to the sanctity of national unity (e.g. Treitschke) and the ‘bored cosmopolitanism’ that Marr claimed ruled Germany in the 1870s and 80s (Miller and Ury 2012). Similarly for Grüner (2010) ‘the concept of “cosmopolitan” or “cosmopolitanism” has in general rarely if ever been
15
As he notes, the Austro-Hungarian empire had faced similar problems, dealing with them by assimilation in Hungary and defensive concessions in Austria, ‘whereas the Soviets pursued an active, prophylactic strategy of promoting non-Russian nation-building to prevent the growth of nationalism’. Martin (2001: 15-16) later relates this strategy to Miroslav Hroch’s model of nationalism and notes that Lenin used the terms ‘positive’ and ‘affirmative’ (polozhitel’naia).
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understood as something positive in Russian lands’. The Zhdanovshchina campaign from the late 1940s to Stalin’s death in 1953 – to subjugate the intelligentsia and re-establish Party control believed to have slipped during the War – focussed on the ‘discovery’ of cosmopolitans, especially Jews, purges in arts and culture to culminate in the purge of the Doctor’s Plot16. Although this overt antisemitism waned after 1953 there were recurrent revivals, notably the Moczar purges in Poland in 1968, and discrimination against Jews in the Soviet Union continued (for example in the numerus clausus for all Soviet university students who were identifiable as Jews) at least until the Gorbachev period. Further, as Smoler (2016) points out these campaigns were an unmasking – usually accompanied by a continuous investigation into true Jewish names hidden behind Russian pseudonyms which, she argues exemplifies Homi Bhabha’s ‘unhomely’ as the repression and projection of what one fears about oneself onto the colonised peoples, particularly in this case of concerns the expulsion of Others who are already domesticated, have been culturally conquered for decades, but who, because of this, have become dangerous. Delanty (2014) suggests that ‘the point [ of cosmopolitanism] is not … simply to find within the cultures of the world common values or instances of exchange and plurality, but to identify sources of critical dialogue and the cultivation of critical thought’. As terroristic rule diminished and by the 1960s and 70s a partially tolerated samizdat culture emerged alongside the official Soviet culture creating an alternative network of political comment and cultural expression. Here the ironic figure of the marginalized censored Leningrad poet dreaming of a life in Paris or New York might be a more subversively ‘cosmopolitan’ figure than the ersatz Georgian Folk Dance Ensemble performing at a theatre in Moscow. More poignantly though as Gould (2012) argues, and as noted above, translation was an important cultural activity in the Soviet Union. It was often open to those (including many Jewish intellectuals) whose own work was banned or publicly condemned and for whom it became a medium of cultural resistance. Further for Smoler (2016) translation is an act of mediation and self-concealment and when successful is a sensitive cultural transfer entailing knowledge of the foreign that is based on recognition of both equivalence and difference. Both Gould and Smoler draw attention to the work of Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin (1911-2003)
16
Literaturnaya gazeta exposed’ Yahovlev as actually called Kholzman, Sanov as Smulson, Maxtich as Finkelstein and so on. ‘Protivanti patrioticheskoy kritiiki’12.2.1949
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a Soviet writer and poet who was renowned as a literary translator and often worked from the national languages which Stalin tried to obliterate, thereby ‘honouring ethnic difference even where toleration had been replaced by annihilation’ (Gould 2012:404). Increasingly excluded from Soviet academies after 1968 (after a poem about the Yi people on the Chinese border brought accusations of ‘Zionism’) his translations of Persian, Turkic and Caucasian literature became chronicles of deportation and dispossession. In his novel Dekada (serialized in 1982 but published in the Soviet Union in its entirety only in 1990) he addresses ethnic conflicts that are legacies of the colonial deportations of populations and the violence that ensues when departed Chechens return to reclaim property now occupied by Russians (Adler 2012: 88). Lipkin reveals the imperial cultural exploitation of Muslim peoples, by seeking to empathise and to explain the non-Slavic and non-European alterity of their literary thinking (Smoler 2016). He further condemns the arrogance of colonial powers by ridiculing their ‘barbarian translators, sawbones translators’ when for example in the Kazakh dekada (ten days) literary festival hurried rhymed translations would appear by people who had never seen a line of Kazakh poetry before (Witt, 2011:164). Meanwhile translation was not just a way of earning a living but also ‘became an area of clandestine, coded messages’ frequently unmasked the myth of the harmonious, ethnically liberal communist family of peoples and at the same time links itself with the problem of translation (Smoler 2016). We have concentrated in this chapter on the question of internationalism and cosmopolitanism in relation to communist states, rather than the undoubted cosmopolitanism (and sometimes the anti-cosmopolitan ‘national communism’) of individual communists. Yet even at the state level, communist cosmopolitanism is not an oxymoron but more like a complex mixture of contradictory elements which some might like to call dialectical. As Rupprecht (2015: 290) concludes, ‘...Soviet internationalism after Stalin...stood in a context of rather similar developments in Europe and North America at the same time.’ Communism is certainly not to be equated with national socialism, pace the cruder versions of theories of totalitarianism, but in the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc it could in a sense be called an imperial socialism, with the imperial motif surviving in postSoviet Russia.17Cosmopolitanism has an aspirational dimension and the goal of creating a 17
See, for example, Outhwaite 2016: chapter 6).
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post-national union of soviet peoples was certainly that, although it failed on pretty much all levels – social, economic, political and humanitarian. In the end perhaps the cosmopolitanism of the system was evidenced in the interstices – of those who attempted to give some reality to the utopian claims of the system and those who struggled to find inter-cultural forms of expression that circumvented and transcended the rigid formulas of hypostasized national identities.
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